These health care workers say they were fired after raising safety concerns
Marian Weber says she wanted to make Ketchikan, Alaska, her forever home. With its widespread greenery and rainy days, and waterfront crowded by houses, it was a long-awaited dream. And staying for good seemed like a real possibility.
Weber, 47, was a travel nurse contracted to work at the city-owned Ketchikan Hospital, run by PeaceHealth, a not-for-profit health care system. She says she arrived in April 2021, and the hospital renewed her contract in August before promptly terminating it within the same month.
“They thanked me for extending, they were excited that I was going to stay through the winter, and then a few hours later, they rounded back just asking if we had anything we wanted to discuss,” said Weber. “I escalated a problem.”
The problem Weber said she escalated was a patient safety concern. She explained that two intensive care level Covid-19 patients — one who was intubated and one who required continuous BiPAP (ventilator) support — needed the central monitoring system and transparent doors an ICU room provides.
Instead, Weber said the patients in need of critical care had been placed in the medical-surgical unit with opaque doors and without a central monitoring system, making continuous observation difficult. She says she was worried that nurses might miss something, potentially leading to “catastrophic consequences.” Weber said there were available ICU beds at the time and that the hospital’s possible solution of keeping a nurse in the room for 12 hours, “for prolonged exposure” to Covid-19, didn’t seem sustainable to her.
“I worked my shift Saturday, I had Sunday off, and then I worked Monday,” said Weber. “And then Tuesday morning, my phone is blowing up at 4:30 in the morning, and I wake up and see all these missed calls. I call back, and that’s when my agency said that PeaceHealth has terminated my contract immediately. And that I was not to go to work that day.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/health-care-workers-say-fired-raising-safety-concerns-rcna14710
_________________________________________________________________________
And this shit is why I'm glad I'm retired now
= new reply since forum marked as read
